Climate Action Lab

About Climate Action Lab

Climate Action Lab (CAL) brings together activists, researchers, and artists to reimagine climate politics through the lens of the city as both the frontline impact-zone and the potential source of grassroots alternatives informed by the principles of climate justice.

Mission Statement: Click here to read more about the Climate Action Lab and its mission.

Arenas of Work: CAL works on the following areas of research and organizing:

Fall 2018/Spring 2019

• Food

• Energy

• Waste

Fall 2019

• Green infrastructure
• Housing & Social hubs
• Governance

A People's Climate Plan for NYC Pamphlet

Click here (or below) to view or download A People’s Climate Plan for New York City pamphlet was released on September 20th 2019, in solidarity with the week of Climate Strike actions that will took place in New York and across the world. The pamphlet, considered a living document, emerges from this event and the work of the Climate Action Lab from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. It crystallizes a year-long series of workshops with activists, researchers, and artists intended to reimagine climate politics through the lens of the city as both the frontline impact zone and the source of grassroots alternatives informed by the imperatives of climate justice.

ARCHIVE OF CLIMATE ACTION PLANS & RELATED NEWS AND EVENTS:

We need a plan. How will we cut emissions of greenhouse gas in all sectors of the economy to zero in the relatively brief timespan of a decade and a half that science tells us we have to avoid catastrophic climate change? While decarbonizing society, we also must engage in various forms of adaptation to the present and future impacts of climate chaos. How can we accomplish these twin goals at once, and even make them synergistic? We need a plan, and it has to be a detailed one, with credible checkpoints along the road to a fossil free society.

On this site we collect and archive examples of Climate Action Plans. While we are most interested in the kinds of visionary grassroots proposals that can push the established order towards the sort of radical action necessary, we have also collected particularly exemplary climate action plans published by cities, states, and even countries. On this site we will also publish news connected to climate action planning and related public events. If you know of other climate action plans or related news or public events that would be useful to add to the CAL archive, please email us at [email protected].

• WE ACT’s Northern Manhattan Climate Action Manual. You can access it in short version here and in elaborated version here.

• Georgetown University’s Climate Adaptation Clearinghouse catalogue of plans for New York State & New York City can be accessed here.

• NYC-EJA’s recently released Climate Justice Agenda can be accessed here.

• Ashley Dawson's Op/Ed in The World Post/ Washington Post, “Cape Town’s Water Crisis is a New Apartheid” for their series on global urban futures

Co-sponsored by the Art, Activism, and the Environment research group as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY; the research project Occupy Climate Change! supported by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) under the National Research Programme on Climate (Contract: 2017–01962_3); and the Climate Action Research Cluster of the Social Text Collective.